Randall Ballmer has a new book out, called Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America: An Evangelical's Lament
I have not read the book, and I am not sure that I will. So I won’t take much issue with things that I have no direct knowledge of from the text. On the other hand, I can take a look at what Ballmer has said in interviews. My primary concern is related to Ballmer’s statement in World Magazine related to faith and reason and the hot button issue of Intelligent Design. Odd that I find Ballmer in the opposite corner from Francis Schaeffer and Pope Benedict on that one… but I must digress momentarily.
Ballmer tips his hand on the theme and tone of his book in an iterview in the Star Tribune with Pamela Miller. If the Title doesn’t say enough, try this:
I am a traditional evangelical; it is the right-wing zealots of the religious right who have hijacked my faith. They have taken the gospel, the "good news" of the New Testament, which I consider lovely and redemptive, and turned it into something ugly and punitive.
What is ugly and punitive about the “religious right” one can probably guess. One key passage in his book, quoted extensively on NPR by Linda Wertheimer, is the “Abortion Myth” which is described as “the fiction that the religious right has propagated that it was formed in direct response to the Roe vs. Wade ruling of 1973, when in fact it galvanized as a political movement to defend Bob Jones University”
Ballmer explains the details of an encounter at a Ethics and Public Policy Center conference in 1990:
In the course of one of the sessions, [Paul M.] Weyrich tried to make a point to his Religious Right brethren (no women attended the conference, as I recall). Let’s remember, he said animatedly, that the Religious Right did not come together in response to the Roe decision. No, Weyrich insisted, what got us going as a political movement was the attempt on the part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racially discriminatory policies.
Of course this insinuates that Evangelicals somehow came to the rescue of racism, which I don’t think Ballmer means exactly, but the insinuation is there. The reality was probably more that Evangelicals sensed on a number of issues the encroachment of government into religious life. The question would have been, “as much as we disagree with Bob Jones, if the state can rescind their tax status, they can do the same to us”. But to Ballmer, there is a conspiratorial shadow over the whole conservative movement.
I find Ballmer’s point both hollow and insulting. I was there in the 1980s as well. I guarantee that what motivated Francis Schaeffer’s “Whatever Happened to the Human Race” seminars was not tax status or a dream of an American Theocracy. Schaeffer understood the beauty of the balance between church and state in the USA and adamantly repudiated any notion of a theocracy, It was exactly Roe v. Wade that galvanized Schaeffer’s activism. In fact, the proddings of Schaeffer to engage in this particular issue certainly preceded Jerry Fallwell’s Moral Majority and was initially resisted by many evangelicals. The push to overturn Roe was not a “religious right” issue at all, if Ballmer means a movement of conservative southern evangelicals. It was a Roman Catholic movement joined by a Presbyterian from Switzerland, which evangelicals later joined, and probably more than any other issue has led to the possibility of a group like Evangelicals and Catholics together. I resent the suggestion that the involvement of most of the people I know in the so-called “religious right” is somehow motivated by a defense of Bob Jones, Weyrich’s point about threats to the tax status of Christian colleges notwithstanding.
Ballmer’s stance on abortion is itself hard to fathom. In a WORLD interview with Marvin Olasky, Ballmer makes an odd admission.
WORLD: You write that "on judicial matters, the religious right demands appointees who would diminish individual rights to privacy with regard to abortion." Is there a right to abortion in the Constitution? If so, where is it found?
BALMER: The judicial precedent cited in the Roe decision was the 1965 Griswold ruling, which ensured a right to privacy. I'll let the judicial scholars (which I am not) sort out whether or not privacy is warranted by the Constitution—though I do think it is at the very least implicit in the constitutional protections against search and seizure…
…I view the Constitution as a living, breathing, organic document, not one to be approached mechanistically. The originalists are disingenuous and, frankly, intellectually lazy.
Of course, any well read pro-lifer can respond fairly directly to that weak answer, one doesn’t have to be a lawyer. The problem with the Griswold ruling is not that there might be a right to privacy implied in the Constitution, but that Griswold and subsequent rulings have left that right to privacy undefined. It has no limits, no boundaries. Hence abortion has led to infanticide, euthanasia, infanticide, partial birth abortion, harvesting of fetal body parts and of fetal stem cells. The question is not privacy, it is privacy to do what? And the notion of the constitution being a “living document” has been responded to over and over again. Yes, the constitution can evolve – by amendment. Conservatives only object to the altering of the constitution by judicial creativity.
But the key passage of interest to me was in the World interview:
WORLD: You write that those who believe in creation seek "to replace science curricula with theology, thereby transforming students into catechumens?" What do you think about the rather modest proposals from the intelligent design side that stress teaching the objections that some scientists raise to macro-evolution, rather than catechizing kids in Darwinism?
BALMER: I believe in "creation" in the sense that I acknowledge, on faith, the divine origins of the created order. The problem with intelligent design, as George Will wrote, is "not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not scientific but a creedal test."
Once again, a well-read high school kid could counter that Darwinism has hardly proved to be falsifiable. No amount of evidence can shake the faith of many evolutionists. One could also argue that our kids have in many public institutions become catechumens in the traditon of the Humanist Manifesto, which asserts that “the universe is self-existing and not created” and “there is no God and no cosmic guarantee of human values.” I sense the playing field is not exactly level. But Ballmer takes another step.
As a person of faith, I believe in intelligent design (or something close to it). I believe that an intelligent designer was responsible; in ways I cannot explain, for the created order. But my warrant is the canon of Scripture, not the canons of scientific inquiry. I resent, moreover, the inference behind the intelligent design movement that faith needs validation from science. I refuse to allow the canons of Enlightenment rationalism to be the final arbiter of truth. I elect to live in an enchanted universe where there are forces at play beyond my understanding and control—and where faith, not empiricism or tortured apologetic proofs for the existence of God, serves ultimately as my guide. I wouldn't live anywhere else.
There it is. The familiar voice of hyper-modernism - the odd belief, held with tenacious certainty, that the Enlightenment quest for rationalism has led us to the inarguable fact that faith and reason must live in separate realms. Certainly, as Lewis and Schaeffer and others have argued, rationalism, the idea that all things must be explained by reason alone has been a corrosive to both faith and reason. Few Christian apologists would dispute this. But once again, why must we assume that reason itself was somehow invented by Francis Bacon?
There is an excellent article in First Things by Ryan T. Anderson on the Pope’s recent Regensburg speech, the one that offended radical muslims worldwide. It gets to the heart of what the Pope was trying to say and what Ballmer seems not to understand or accept. Anderson writes of the Pope’s thesis that:
Reason isn’t at odds with faith. And the modern university performs a great disservice to the well-being of all mankind in relegating the truths of religion to personal preferences and radically subjective, private beliefs. The resulting impoverished Christianity and shriveled secular reason are unable to sustain a culture or respond to challenges.
Why in the world should faith NOT seek at least some validation from science, if the God of Scripture is also the God of creation? Christian exegetes may argue for decades or centuries more about the precise meaning of Genesis 1-3 as a textual issue. But does this really mean that “in the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth” cannot be reasonably considered alongside the assertion of Carl Sagan that “the Cosmos is all the ever was and all there ever will be”?
Anderson continues in a passage Francis Schaeffer could have written:
The challenge of which Benedict speaks is the unintended result of the theology of John Duns Scotus (1266-1308) and many of the Protestant reformers who sought to create a Christianity untethered to philosophical truths of what they considered a “foreign” philosophical system. As the pope put it, this leads “to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.” This yields the modern attitude of the “clash” of faith and reason, or the “blind leap” of faith. Lost is the reasonableness of the act of faith itself, gone are the reasons one has for believing—reasons one has for accepting the gospel of Jesus Christ as true revelation. Lost also is the convergence of faith and reason, as his predecessor, John Paul II, put it, “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.” And it is only a true conception of God and man that can ultimately sustain a culture in both virtue and freedom.
This is the problem I seen in Ballmer, the problem I often tackle on this blog. Evangelicals seem to be continually embracing post-modern and hyper-modern assumptions. They continually throw out the baby of rationality with the dirty bathwater of rationalism.
Anderson quotes the Pope directly on the problem of reducing reason to a question of mere “mathematical and empirical” science.
If science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science,” so understood, and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology end up being simply inadequate.
Exactly. The Pope formerly known as Cardinal Ratzinger has diagnosed the postmodern illness. Faith cannot be reduced to mere emotionalism, sentimentality, subjectivism, or corporate consciousness or linguistic games without losing it’s foundation. Ballmer’s words, “I elect to live in an enchanted universe where there are forces at play beyond my understanding and control—and where faith, not empiricism or tortured apologetic proofs for the existence of God, serves ultimately as my guide. I wouldn't live anywhere else” sound poetic and noble enough, but still seem to cut Christianity away from historicity. The plea of John the apostle, that the apostles were “eyewitnesses” who saw and touched a living breathing saviour, before his death and after his resurrection, cannot make any sense unless faith and reason are bound together and not separated.
So Christians can and should be active in politics, can engage both scriptural and medical arguments to defend the unborn, and can and should use reason and evidence to ponder the origins of life and the universe. Ballmer is just wrong on at least these points.
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